Full Screen Anti-aliasing

Hi,

What do I have to do in order to support Full Screen Anti-aliasing on Geforce 2 hardware?

I have changed the settings in the display properties dialog, but so far my app looks the same.
Is there anything in I need to add to the source code to support this feature, or should it just work?

Any help gratefully accepted.

Hmm, I guess this is a bit of a mystery feature then, as I can find no real docs on it, and no one appears to know how to use it. Where are those nvidia people when you need them :slight_smile:

FSAA has nothing to do with OpenGL itself, and you cannot do anything about it from OpenGL.

You shouldn’t have to (or maybe can’t?) do anything in your code to get it to work. Enable it in the display settings should be enough.

Unlike Direct3D, there is no OpenGL function or extension to specifically enable or disable Full SCENE Anti Aliasing.
You have to enable it in the display drivers panel.

FSAA is not working on my current configuration: Windows NT 4.0 Service Pack 6a, Detonator 6.67 NT…

I suppose this is a bug in this (non-)release of the drivers because it worked well with previous versions…

Check which driver version you are using… Also, I think you won’t get FSAA if you are running at a too high resolution: in one of my apps, I would loose FSAA if I maximized then brought the window back to its original size (I am running at 1152x864 32bits color). This is due to how FSAA works (render bigger image and scale it down): you need a lot of video memory to do this at high resolutions…

Regards

Eric

What about the GL_ARB_multisample?
http://oss.sgi.com/projects/ogl-sample/registry/ARB/multisample.txt

Humus, are you sure this extension is supported by consumer boards ? Does your Radeon support it ? My GeForce does not support it with Detonator 6.67 but perhaps it will be supported in later versions…

Regards.

Eric

The only thing I can think of is to make sure UBB (Unified Back/Depth Buffers) is disabled.

  • Matt

Yuckon Ho,

okay, this is kinda off topic, but, what IS FSAA, and does it really mean full SCENE or SCREEN. I’m sure I used to remember it being full screen, but then I might be thinking of another antialiasing technique.

I mean:

what I take to be FSAA is camera jittering. You render the sceen mutliple times with the camera perturbed within a circle describing the resolution of the screen. Each image is accumulated together.

Alternatively, you can anti-alias by doing this kind of thing in hardware at the pixel level by having multiple buckets per pixel. So a point not only projects to a pixel, but projects to a bucket within a pixel (and then, when it comes to rastering, the final colour of the pixel is the average of all its buckets).

So, which is FSAA? Since I thought it was the first approach, then I’d argue that it really IS full SCREEN antialiasing, for the following reason: since you’re jittering the camera, the entire viewport is offset. However, there is nothing to say that the entire scene must be sent to OpenGL while accumulating/jittering the images. (You could easily isolate part of the scene and render that without jittering the camera, and thus the entire scene is NOT antialiased).

What’s the story?

cheers
John

The Display properties for my GeForce says it’s SCENE, but I dunno how it works though

Full-scene. Full-screen would mean that it wouldn’t work for windowed apps.

  • Matt

Originally posted by Eric:
[b]Humus, are you sure this extension is supported by consumer boards ? Does your Radeon support it ? My GeForce does not support it with Detonator 6.67 but perhaps it will be supported in later versions…

Regards.

Eric[/b]

No, it’s not supported by Radeon. I just stumbled over it at the extension registry … don’t know much about it. But since one of the people listed in the contacts for that extension is from nvidia I though GF supported it … I think V5 supports it though, but I’m not sure

well, full SCREEN, full viewport, same difference. The drawable area of the OpenGL client can effectively be thought of as a screen.

[This message has been edited by john (edited 02-05-2001).]